What’s the deal about Selecting, ‘Open Pollinated’ Varieties?

When people seed-save, they are urged to select, ‘open-pollinated’ varieties.
What does this mean exactly?

The confusion may be understanding the difference between selecting seeds from ‘Open Pollinated’plants as distinguished from ‘Hybrid’ varieties.

In open pollinated varieties of plants, strict (or lucky!) attention is paid to planting distances between different varieties in the same vegetable family. Or specific techniques breeding techniques, like staggering pollen producing times, or ‘bagging’ varieties so that pollen from one variety does not ‘mate’ with another variety, producing a hybrid.

Hybrid is not necessarily undesirable. Hybridizing happens in nature all the time.

In the animal, and vegetable kingdoms;)
I grow several hybrid varieties of vegetables like spinach, and corn because they have specific traits, that I find desirable.

Most of the vegetables that many people consume these days, would likely be, from hybrid varieties.

Many plants ‘cross-pollinate’ as their primary means of reproduction. (as compared to self-pollinators, described in a prior post) Their flowers accept pollen from a plant of the same species that has a different genetic makeup. Plants grown from these seeds, may have different characteristics from the parent plant.

However, if a seed saver, saves seed from a hybrid plant( usually having the symbol F1 or F2 beside the variety name), they will not know until they grow that seed ‘out’ what characteristics those plants will have. Which specific traits selected from their parent plants intentionally by breeders.

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Great information, seedywen. Another popular term seen frequently with open-pollinated is “Heirloom.” Are heirloom seeds always open-pollinated? Are open-pollinated seeds always heirloom?
What exactly makes a seed heirloom?

There’s a lot of argument about what makes a seed “Heirloom”🙂 usually, it means it’s old, and people think it’s worth saving (otherwise it wouldn’t still be around). Almost all heirlooms are open pollinated but some would argue that a few of the oldest useful F1 hybrids should be heirlooms. Open pollinated varieties are not all heirlooms – you could create a new OP variety tomorrow, which would be OP but not heirloom because it isn’t old enough.

A quick Google will get you lots more information, including conflicting definitions, but here’s Wikipedia as a start:

Here’s something I wrote a few years ago on the difference between OP, Hybrid and GMO (lots of people get hybrid and GMO mixed up)

GM? Hybrid? Open-pollinated?

What’s the difference?

Genetically modified (GM) plants are transgenic varieties developed by inserting a gene from another organism – which may not even be a plant – into the plant.

A hybrid variety is made by cross-pollinating two specific parent varieties of the same or closely related species. This first generation of offspring is referred to as the F1 hybrid. Although F1 hybrids often show increased yield and vigor, the plants will not breed true if the seeds are saved. Some heirlooms are hybrids. Hybrid does NOT mean genetically modified, nor are all seeds of hybrid parents sterile.

Open pollinated varieties are plants that will breed true from seed saved from the parent plants. Many heirloom varieties are open-pollinated. Open pollinated varieties may be self-pollinating (do not need to be isolated) or cross-pollinating (need to be isolated from other varieties of the same species in order to breed true).

One is that seeds from a named fruit variety won’t necessarily grow out true to that variety, so if you want to be sure what you’re going to get, you graft a piece of the variety you want. I suspect that the “not growing true” thing is mostly because it would take so long to stabilise a new variety. If you’re breeding a new pea variety you can go through 2 generations a year and stabilise fairly quickly. With an apple tree, you need several years just to see what you’re going to get. Way faster and more reliable to graft.

Second issue is that even if the fruit comes true, your named variety won’t necessarily grow strong roots and a strong tree (so you might graft it on a strong rootstock) or you might want a dwarf tree (so you graft it onto a dwarfing rootstock).

People do grow fruit tree seedlings, though, if they have the space and time, just to see what they might get. That’s one way of getting new varieties. Another is noticing “sports” (different branches or shoots) on an existing tree and propagating them.